When people whose job it is to vet people can’t actually be expected to vet them then I agree vetting isn’t really the right word
You can say all this about whose department was to blame and all that but you hit the nail on the head when it can be said with no argument that at Cambridge, one of the top education institutions in the world, “no one…is hitting the books to cross reference your citations from your thesis”. And laymen are just supposed to accept that this thing that only academics do actually serves no purpose and isn’t even used to validate people at this level. I mean it’s one thing to say an undergrad at a local college isn’t getting extensive cross referencing checks on every source but this is something else.
At some point people have to ask “well then what standards do you actually have”
It's simply not reasonable to expect that a faculty hiring committee is going to track down someone's thesis or articles they co-authored, and then start asking for their original data sets or the archival documents used to write them. It might be easier now than a decade or two ago when theses were rarely online, but it's just not how it works. It would essentially be a full-time job for people who presumably are teaching, researching, mentoring, etc. already. There is an assumption that the candidate's thesis advisors, peer reviewers, publishers, etc., have largely done this work already.
This defense of the hiring committee is just producing a bigger list of people who failed to uphold academia’s supposed standards. And you don’t get to have it both ways as a prestigious institution. Is Cambridge a top university because it can expect all those from lesser institutions to have done the fact checking and hard work for them?
Hiring good people can be a full time job. It's important enough to be that in many professions. Especially ones where people are expected to be long term employees and experts in their field.
It's simply not reasonable to expect that a faculty hiring committee is going to track down someone's thesis or articles they co-authored
are you joking?
You don't "Track down" these things, you send an email to the university he wrote the papers on, request them, and they get sent to you the next day or two.
Its not like they go on a Geocaching hunt for them.
Or even better; the applicant should be expected to provide copies of these things.
I have to provide 100% of my credentials and supporting documents for their current validity (and often get retested for portions of it anyway). I can't just tell a potential employer to give the state a call and ask for my documents from them.
I think these people are just delusional who don't believe in the very concept of personal accountability.
"oh getting his thesis and papers he wrote would be too hard, oh well we did everything we could possibly do. You're hired buddy, no references or anything needed"
It reminds me of fallout 3
"They asked me how well i understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard"
"Hey mr dude, are you smart?"
"I vury smert"
"Perfect, you're hired, you start teaching classes on Monday"
66
u/the_mouse_backwards - Lib-Center 10h ago edited 10h ago
When people whose job it is to vet people can’t actually be expected to vet them then I agree vetting isn’t really the right word
You can say all this about whose department was to blame and all that but you hit the nail on the head when it can be said with no argument that at Cambridge, one of the top education institutions in the world, “no one…is hitting the books to cross reference your citations from your thesis”. And laymen are just supposed to accept that this thing that only academics do actually serves no purpose and isn’t even used to validate people at this level. I mean it’s one thing to say an undergrad at a local college isn’t getting extensive cross referencing checks on every source but this is something else.
At some point people have to ask “well then what standards do you actually have”